A Jolly by Josh eBook

MCMII

Dear Charlie,—­Having a spare
moment as I crossed the continent last time, I
sat down in the rear end of a Lake Shore Limited train,
and began to cast about me with a view to hitting upon
some way of passing the time amicably with myself.
As I looked about the car, I studied the faces
and persons of my fellow-travellers, and found
them uniformly uninteresting. My mind wandered
from them out of the window, and I noted with
a casual eye the advance civilization was making
on both sides of the track. I began wandering
vaguely from that back to the time when this was a
trackless wilderness; and I pictured to myself
the advent of the white man, and so on in an aimless
sort of a way, from the beginning of our country
until I reached the Declaration of Independence,
the terms of which have always remained vividly impressed
upon my mind.

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness!” That is what we are after.
So it is. How ridiculous! Why don’t
we think of it oftener? How many of us are
free? How many of us are happy? And, particularly,
how many of us would be any happier if we got the
things we want? What foolish wants we have,
anyway! Almost everybody wants something
they don’t want.

Just then my eye caught sight of the
official stenographer advertised as free.
To an economical soul like mine the opportunity
of having a free stenographer for a day and a half
was too good to let slip by. So, placing
my chair up alongside of his, I took from my pocket
a letter which I had just received from my nephew,
who had been spending his vacation in the West, and
which I had not known exactly how to answer.

The train of thoughts in which I had
indulged, and the peculiarly vacant condition
of my mind, made the time favorable for expansion
upon the theme which had occurred to me; and so
I inflicted on the poor boy a long letter, or
sermon, or essay, or whatever you may please to
call it, which I am enclosing to you.

I know that you are interested
in topics of this sort, and so send
it along with an apology for the amount of your
valuable time
which I am so wilfully wasting.

Your
old friend,
Josh.

Dear Tom,—­I have just received your
letter, asking if you could bring a pony back from
Colorado. I answer most assuredly, “Yes”;
that is, if you want to! But do you want to?
This question having occurred to my mind, and perhaps
not to yours, you must excuse my becoming a little
long-winded if I launch out on a train of ideas which
has presented itself to my mind.

Let me briefly serve up the circumstances that surround
you, and perhaps I can paint them so that you will
look at them from a new point of view.

You are eighteen years of age. You have lived
surrounded by wealth and a good deal of luxury; but
the luxury in which you were lapped was the comfort
with which a man of great working brain, who has well
earned the right to spend freely, chose to take for
his own rest and amusement, knowing well the value
of every cent he has spent or given away.